The Sneak Attack
I’ve been thinking about the role that humor plays in a narrative. We often regard humor as an end in and of itself, something that adds entertainment – who doesn’t like to laugh? This approach is natural and worthwhile, but…
Category Playing Games
Fallout
I’ve been playing and replaying old Fallout games – there may be some kind of tenuous connection between that and the release of Fallout 4, but mostly I just finally got around to playing through New Vegas and that whetted…
Gaming The System
Over time I’ve started moderating my consumption of media the same way one might moderate their consumption of food or of drugs – by closely monitoring how I feel and react afterwards, what the short and long term effects are,…
On Why I’m Not Writing About The Beginner’s Guide
So I’ve come to a decision to not write about The Beginner’s Guide, and I think this decision requires some explanation. Obviously, yes, by stating that I’m not writing about it, and then by explaining that statement, I am writing…
Habits
I uninstalled Team Fortress 2 about two weeks ago now. Not for the first time, and it remains to be seen if it will be the last – though my past history with multiplayer games suggests it won’t be. At one…
Passing Time
In 1995 when Chrono Trigger came out, I would have just turned 12. I stayed up through the Summer nights of Sacramento, playing until 5 in the morning on the cracked naugahyde couch in my dad’s living room. 20 years…
Tiny Gods
One appealing aspect of religion is that it lets us presume our world is crafted with the same care and intent that we put into our art. The difference here isn’t a matter of intelligent design vs unintelligent design – to…
Listen
Dark souls is frequently described as masochistically difficult. I don’t think this is very apt: Masochism implies a state of being acted upon, of being made to suffer by an outside force. Dark Souls never makes you do anything, only…
Hexagon
The biggest difference between Super Hexagon and other similar games, fast paced reaction endurance challenges like Flappy Bird and Canabalt and Race the Sun, is that the presentation is inverted. You aren’t running away from or towards anything, but rolling…
City On Fire
There are certain common threads that run through stories about violence. Violence has consequences – this is almost the very definition of violence. When you forcibly enact your will upon the world, things change, and often not in the ways you…